Intelligent fridge solves Corrie kettle conundrum
March 24th, 2009
DAAA DA DAA DA DA DA
There’s a well know truism regarding the UK soap Coronation Street and its 10 million viewers brewing up during the ad-breaks: it’s that this communal cuppa has the facility to cause massive power surges on the UK National Grid. This is especially so during those mustn’t miss (yawn) episodes (just lost 10 million readers). Ken’s second time around marriage to dreary Deirdre caused a 1,200 megawatt power surge back in 2005. This however lagged behind the 2,290 megawatt power surge caused by the April 2001 episode of EastEnders which revealed who had shot Phil Mitchell. Enough of this already!!!
To cope with these surges or ’spike’s, electricity suppliers have to build in a good deal of redundant capacity into their supply system. There is of course a considerable environmental and financial cost involved here.
The simple solution would be to banish Ken & Dreary and their ilk to TV’s room 101. This would be my solution!!! Okay I agree it’s not feasible and there’s always another soap - the problem of peak demand for electricity remains soaps or no soaps - think early morning cup of coffee for 10 million people and 10 million microwave dinners.
Is there a solution to our lemming like behaviour when it comes to our use of electricity with its concomitant environmental downside?
What if 10 million or more non-critical (i.e. don’t need power all the time) electrical appliances such as fridges and freezers could switch them selves off when they detected a surge in demand for electricity on the National Grid; is this possible?
Adrian McEwen a clean technology inventor put forward the idea of a device that does just this on BBC Radio 4’s Click on programme this week. The idea is that a device monitors the frequency of the mains supply; and as we know (do we?) a dip in the frequency correlates to an increased surge in supply of electricity on the National Grid. So as the frequency dips perhaps 10 million fridges and freezers across the UK could switch them selves off until the frequency of the mains comes back up again and the demand for supply goes back to ‘normal’.
Putting aside the health and safety issues of defrosting meat etc this seems to be a simple idea with massive potential to save on requirements for electrical generation. Has this guy patented this idea? Get me the patent office number quick! ; - )
Cleanliness is next to Godliness
March 17th, 2009
The Vatican newspaper says that perhaps the washing machine did more to liberate women in the 20th century than the pill or the right to work.
This was reported in a lengthy article titled “The Washing Machine and the Liberation of Women - Put in the Detergent, Close the Lid and Relax.”
The article was printed at the weekend in l’Osservatore Romano, the semi-official Vatican newspaper, to mark international Women’s Day on Sunday.
“What in the 20th century did more to liberate Western women?,” asks the article, which was written by a woman.
“The debate is heated. Some say the pill, some say abortion rights and some the right to work outside the home. Some, however, dare to go further: the washing machine,” it says.
It then goes on to talk about the history of washing machines, starting with a rudimentary model in 1767 in Germany and ending up with today’s trendy launderettes where a woman can have a cappuccino with friends while the tumbler turns.
Source Reuters
5 Top Tat Kitchen Gadgets
March 11th, 2009
Perhaps it’s the confused snarl of electric leads and adaptor leads that I won’t throw away just-in-case I need one of them. Or perhaps it’s the cupboard cramming capacity of unused gadgets that stubbornly remind me of my erstwhile folly. Or perhaps it’s that I’m an old grouch that no longer sees the joy of frivolous indulgence in the gadget. What ever the case, I now feel that any gadget has to be pretty darn good before I give it cupboard space. And that’s what this article is about, tat kitchen gadgets that clutter up your life. In the spirit of many blogs I’ve gone for a hit list.
This article was inspired by the blog at www.coolest-gadgets.com, which if you’re a gadget freak is probably the place for you. The site lists thousands of gadgets amongst which are nearly 300 ‘cool’ kitchen gadgets
Don’t get me wrong, I’m intrigued by the inventiveness and ingenuity shown by those that want to shift product. It’s just that I wish they would cut out the middle man sometimes and shift their product straight to the tip. So let’s have a run down of the top 5 Top Tat Kitchen Gadgets - queue ‘Top of the Pops’ count down music.
The portable toaster - watch your fingers?
5 The portable toaster: This i something that looks like a flowery cake slice.You press it against the bread (hopefully not your hand) until it reaches a satisfactory shade of golden brown. And how do you know when you’ve reached the point of toasty satisfaction? well you can judge this by the number of flowers that appear on the contraption. One flower under done? a garden of flowers and it’s ‘toast’? Stoptrying to reinvent what works well already - the pop-up-toaster!
I was unable to find a source for this one - if you manage to find out where you can get this from perhaps you are on the wrong website ; - )
It rotates it peels potatoes - hey let's call it the Rotato
4 The Rotato: What would the UK Dragon Duncan Bannatyne say about this one: probably something about having bought his wife a £1.50 potato peeler for Christmas….. Seriously though does any body have enough work surface in their kitchen to make room for a glorified potato peeler? As fan of Tesco value potatoes I wonder if the potatoes ranging from the size of small rugby ball to the size of a shrunken grape would fit this machine? However if you wish to purchase one of these peelers you get one from Amazon.com
Tasteless food? why not inject some flavour?
3 The Flavor Injector: Okay so your food is tasteless. Why not inject some flavour? Alternatively why no eat food with some taste!
Okay I accept this is what they do in some urban meat packing plant to get your taste buds zinging; after which they stamp it ‘country fresh’. But not at home! not in front of the kids! In the words of Bob Dylan’s Joey, “they (children) should never know of (this).”
What flavour are you going inject into a chicken anyway?- chicken flavour? chicken barbecue crisp flavour? I know these probably have a legitimate culinary use but these things were a surprise to me and I couldn’t resist the puns.If you want one you can get one again at you’ll find them at Amazon.com
Only manage half a banana? Reach for the Nana Saver.
2 The Nana Saver The culinary equivalent of the bicycle clip the Nana /saver.
Some words of advice: buy child size bananas, make a fruit salad, find a friend to share a banana with. Don’t buy a banana saver unless your doing it to be kitsch.
Should you however wish to do so you’ll find them here
Okay so you’ve read this far down and your waiting for the numero uno. Okay, I could have chosen tea that is actually picked by monkeys, monkeys not just a marketing ploy then; mop slippers that are both a mop and slippers, wow; a pop up hot-dog cooker that cooks both the buns and the hot-dogs, for all of you on the hot-dog diet; an ice-cream tub locking mechanism, what ever happened to self restraint; a Margret Thatcher set of nut crackers, I was tempted by this one myself and quite a few more.
Dan, Deran, Deran,De Da….
Why not cook on the table? cos we can
1 The Cooka With this you can cook your lunch on the table and presumably eat your lunch on the cooker?
This thing looks hazardous (I’m not saying it is - this is just an opinion ; - 0), 1950’s retro (not a bad thing) and something I wouldn’t use just once …. no I would never use it!. Back of the cupboard material I think. Anyway I thought these kinda of things went out of fashion with the chopomatic!
The heating pad can apparently can take a massive temperature range and your french polished table underneath will suffer no ill effects.
What will they think of next? ;- )<–>
Gimme Some Credit ….. for a Washer, a Cooker, a Fridge
March 6th, 2009
Don't want your old washer?
Has your washing machine broken down and is your dirty washing piling up? or has your cooker blown a fuse, and are you resorting to takeaways and microwave food?
The quick and easy solution is to go online to a kitchen appliance comparison website and pick up a bargain. Problem solved!
What if you don’t have the money to do this and can’t access credit because of a low income, no income or a poor credit rating? Well a South Wales company ‘Buy as You View’ may or may not have the solution to your problem; they offer credit to ‘high risk’ groups that might not get credit elsewhere. ‘Buy as You View’ sell a range of consumer items on credit in South Wales, the Midlands, the North of England and in the Central Belt Scotland. But it’s the high rates of interest they are charging that is causing concern. The average APR ‘Buy as You View’ charge to their customers is a whacking 49.9% according to their website. BBC Radio 4’s consumer affairs programme ‘You and Yours’ ran a piece today (Friday 6th March 2009) on how ‘Buy as You View’ operate in this market.
The programme looked at a couple of cases. One was that of David Cato a resident of South Stockton a deprived post industrial area in the North East of England. Mr Cato informed the programme that he bought a cooker for £219.99 and a fridge for around £100 from ‘Buy as You View’; the total value of his purchases being around £320.00. Mr Cato continues that the total cost of the goods including and 3 years warranty will be in excess of a thousand pounds by the time he has finished paying for them, this money being paid over a 3 year period. I’ll leave Mr Cato to tell his own story: Mr Cato’s Story
‘Buy as You View’, according to the Radio 4 article, have promised to look into Mr Cato’s case.
Dari Taylor the MP for Stockton South was contacted by the Radio 4 programme. Her impression was that the ‘limited income groups were being badly used by the company (Buy as You View)’ and that ‘these people have very definite needs…. but that these needs become absolutely exploited’.
This article is not suggesting, as the Radio 4 is not, that ‘Buy as You View’ is doing anything illegal. But for Dari Taylor the high rates of interest can’t be justified and she together with a local church action group ‘Thrive’ is producing a leaflet encouraging low income and no income people to look elsewhere for credit such as credit unions.
On this point its well worth making a comparison between what ‘Buy as You View’ are offering and the deal that could be got using a loan from a credit union and going online to search out a bargain.
Let’s take the example of the Hotpoint WDL540P washer dryer which is being offered as of 6th March 2009 at £1127.88 on the ‘Buy as You View’ web site. This price includes a 3 year warranty with payment to be made over 3 years. Alternatively the Thornaby Credit Union, which offers loans to Stockton residents, has an APR rate of 12.7% for regular savers. After a quick search online on my own site Search4KitchenAppliances I found the same washer dryer being sold for £299.94 by Bennetts Electrical. An additional 3 years warranty at £99.99 and a £40 delivery charge brought the total to £439.93. At 12.7% APR over 3 years this would bring the cost of this washer dryer to £526.15, giving a saving of £601.73 on the same machine purchased at ‘Buy as You View’. Go figure! : - (
The kitsch Kitchen
March 4th, 2009
When considering prospective topics for today’s article the title ‘Kitsch Kitchen’ came to mind. This title proved to be so alluring that the article had to be written.
Kitsch etymologically refers to bad or inferior taste: think garden gnomes. But bad can be so bad that it’s good! Kitsch can make you smile or cringe. Me I think it’s a poke in the eye of the style police which has to be a good thing.
Kitchens are often referential in their styling. Think shaker, country kitchen or post modernist. These kitchens are polite, they reassure and confirm our styling assumptions; they are hypnotic in that they take us to a place that is not here and not now. This is the styling of conformity and deference and what’s worse they are humourless. Thankfully the reality is that most of our lives don’t live up (or down) to these ideals, the everyday reality of shopping lists, fridge magnets and uncoordinated décor and crockery etc means we fall short of the ideal. Speaking for myself I am still left with a mild sense of inadequacy that I haven’t quite lived up to the mark.
Who will save us from this kitchen conundrum? Perhaps kitsch will?
Kitsch at its best can be non-conformist, a reminder that we can make up our own minds about things and that we shouldn’t feel pressured because that’s what you do or that’s what everybody else does; it can be funny, a reminder that we don’t have to take everything so seriously; it can be an expression of our individuality in that it says something about ‘what I can relate to’, ‘the thing that I like’.
What then is the ‘kitsch kitchen’ apart from a catchy title? I’m reminded of auntie of mine who I think was unconsciously kitsch – but I may be wrong about that. Her home had something of the gypsy caravan about it where all her best and shiniest things were displayed for all to see. Her kitchen was a testament to black and red Fablon (sticky-back-plastic). This was adhered to most available surfaces, vertical and horizontal. And was shaped and cut to emphasise handles and edges. Her kitchen window had the best Oklahoma musical gingham curtains which were tied back. Other curtains on cupboards and doors were vibrant and gay and appeared to have been carefully chosen to clash with each other. If you supplement this background décor with the shiny objects, of which I can recall only an extensive glass menagerie and 1970’s popular art, I think you get an idea of a kitsch kitchen.
Though this image may make you smile, I think the point is that you get an idea of the person that went to considerable effort to make their home an expression of who they were irrespective of ‘good taste’. You warm to them.
Okay so you’re not going to Fablon your kitchen (I don’t blame you) but how about adding some kitsch touches to remind you that conformity is not a virtue and not to take everything (certainly not your kitchen) too seriously. ; - )
The chip pan has had it’s chips: safe cooking and deep fryers
March 1st, 2009
Fish and chips
Tiring of frozen pre-battered fish and pre-browned oven chips we decided yesterday evening to have deep fried fish and chips. Eschewing the long term dangers off clogged arteries and the short term dangers of the chip pan fires we went for the immediate gratification that is (or was) the UK’s national dish: fish and chips.
We salved our conscience in respect to the long term hazard: we don’t even own a chip pan, and surely this occasional treat would not impact on arterial health. However the clear and present danger of a pan of boiling oil adjacent to an ignition source, that is the cooker, was not so easily ignored.
The fish and chips and mushy peas I can tell you were delicious.
Hazardous frying
Was I overestimating the dangers of chip pan fires I wondered? No is the simple answer – especially if you:
- Have come back late from the pub and need your fry up fix.
- Become distracted / fall asleep whilst cooking chips or whatever
- Have filled your chip pan more than 1/3 full with oil
- Your pan is not clean
Kitchen safety at UK’s Directgov tells it as it is. Nearly 2/3rds of domestic fires are caused by something directly related to cooking. The site also gives a heap of other advice regarding kitchen safety. One salient point is that it advises getting rid of the chip pan and replacing it with a thermostatically controlled deep fat fryer.
The old duffer Keith Floyd in a public information film of the 70’s (not such an old duffer then I think) gives advice on extinguishing chip pan fires; this can now can be seen on Youtube and is worth a look. Did I mention about not using a chip pan when you’re intoxicated?
Back to the deep fat fryer (DFF) and risking your long term rather than your short term health - I’m sure DFF’s are fine if you use them in moderation.
Choosing a deep fryer
Which one to buy? The most extensive collection of independent reviews I discovered were on www.amazon.co.uk. The consumer information site www.which.com was disappointing in that it provided no reviews of DFFs and www.reevoo.com the review site was no better, the coverage here was scanty.
There are a range of issues to be considered when buying a DFF:
- Safety
- Ease of cleaning
- Build quality
- Price
Being the most important ones.
The DFF that really stands out at Amazon is the Tefal Actifry FZ 7000
It’s USP (unique selling point) is that it uses only a teaspoon of oil to fry 1kg of chips. This sounds so unlikely that Amazon have a short video at Tefal Actifry FZ 7000
Other DFFs that scored highly at Amazon (5 stars), though without the Tefal’s low cooking oil technology and with far less reviews were:
- Morphy Richards 45470 Brushed Stainless Steel Fryer
which currently retails at Amazon at £49.99 though I found cheaper at Electric Shopping.com
- Russell Hobbs 11772 Fryer in stainless steel with 1.5KG & 4 LT capacity and thermostat
This one currently retails at Amazon at £37.99
- De’Longhi Professional Cool-Zone Fryer with Easy Clean, 1Kg
which again currently retails at Amazon at £53.82
I think I will be going for the Actifry as the minimal use of cooking oil apparently solves both my health dilemmas: kitchen fires and clogged arteries.
Safe Cooking ; - )
Credit Crunch Kitchen
March 1st, 2009
As a child in Manchester (UK) in the 1960’s I recall money was pretty tight. Large household items were bought on the ‘never never’ as credit (debt) used to be called. The kitchen appliances we had were few: a cooker, a fridge with an ice box, a washing machine, and a kettle. These were kept until they could no longer be fixed or fell apart and they were then replaced by locally bought items on the ‘never never’.
I don’t mean be sentimental about the good old bad old days, though to some extent I do agree that less is more: I now find that one of my pet hates are kitchen gadgets that are never used!
With the global paranoia: the big CC (credit crunch) in full swing, I thought it would be interesting (sic) to see how cheaply a kitchen could be fitted out with essential appliances. N.B. Some might not be able to live without a doughnut maker or George’s griddle but well stick to the 60’s model. Though in the 60’s I had an auntie that kept her milk cool in the bath!!!
My self appointed task for these frugal times was to find the cheapest array of basic kitchen appliances, using the kitchen of my childhood as a base line of what is essential in a kitchen. All appliances had to be new, I decided; used appliances often have no guarantee and can be more expensive in the long run.. Also appliances need to have a reasonable to level of user satisfaction. This was measured by means of the independent review site www.reevoo.com
The credit crunch cooker
The cheapest cooker found was the INDESIT K3E1WG. This is a free standing white enamel cooker has four hot plates and a combined oven and grill. This cooker is sold by Comet for £146.80 and gets an overall rating of 8.2 out of 10 at Reevoo based on 30 independent reviews.
The credit crunch fridge
The cheapest one found was the MATSUI MUR1107WW a 4.9 cubic foot fridge with an ice compartment. The rating at Reevoo was 7.5 out of 10 based on 67 independent reviews. This fridge retails at Currys at £109.99.
The credit crunch washing machine
The BEKO WM5100W is 1000 spin AA rated washing machine with 30 a minute quick wash cycle was the lowest priced washing machine that was found, it sells at Comet for £177.11. This scored 8 out of 10 from 302 impartial reviews at Reevo.
The credit crunch kettle
The CARLTON CKC2171 was the lowest priced kettle that was discovered and it sells at Comet (again) for £11.92. This gets a review rating of 7.7 out of 10 at Reevoo but this time based on only 2 reviews.
Total cost
Adding up all these kitchen appliances:
- Cooker (INDESIT K3E1WG.) £146.80
- Fridge (MATSUI MUR1107WW) £109.99
- Washing machine (BEKO WM5100W) £177.11
- Kettle (CARLTON CKC2171) £11.92
We get a grand total £445.82
And what is this in old money?
According to www.measuringworth.com using the retail price index you could have bought the above 1965 version of the kitchen appliances in 1965 for £32 give or take the odd shilling or so.
